Preparing the Ground for Summer Reading

• “Mrs. Essenburg, I want to read that book I saw you reading a while ago—the first word of the title is ‘Maybe.’” 
• “I liked The War That Saved My Life. Do you have any other historical fiction?”
• “Are there more books by Alan Gratz?”
• “If I want to read this series with five books in it, is that enough?”

All I’d planned to do was introduce the idea of a want-to-read list, pass one out, and have students paste it into the back of their journals. Then over the next 3 weeks they could begin collecting titles they might want to read over the 6-week summer vacation. But as students turned to each other for recommendations, descended on the classroom library to check titles, and peppered me with questions, I decided to scrap the vocabulary lesson and just ride the wave of reading interest. I’ve found that summer reading goes so much better when the ground has been well prepared, and that was happening.

What does preparing the ground for summer reading look like?

• Students making goals. In this case, a want-to-read list with at least 5 books on it by the time term ends.
• Teacher book talks. I’m giving a book talk a day, sharing a title from our school’s new e-library that students might be interested in. 
• Student book talks. Next week every student will give a book talk to the class, sharing a title they’ve enjoyed this term that their classmates might want to add to their want-to-read list.
• A Google Doc to curate my favorite titles from our e-library (see photo above). I might love exploring, but many students might initially be overwhelmed. So my document has a screenshot of the book cover, the title linked to the library, and a brief by me.

I spent so many years just handing out a summer reading assignment on the last day of school. It’s so much more fun to begin generating interest and expectation, setting students up for success ahead of time. 

What do you do to prepare the ground for summer reading? 

Don't Just Hand That Paper In--Reflect on It!

An exercise in choosing powerful words: students categorizing verbs

This week, I resisted temptation. There’s so much learning that can happen between student completion of a paper and teacher assessment of it, if student writers are given an opportunity to reflect on the effort they’ve just made. But I’m always tempted to just collect a final draft and move on without giving writers that chance to reflect. I’m always glad when I resist that temptation, like I did yesterday when 6th and 7th graders handed in the final draft of the stories they’d been working on. I learned things, they learned things, and we are all poised to move to the next stage of growth with more awareness. 

In order to help writers reflect yesterday, I gave them the following sentence stems…

• The reason I wanted to tell this story is…
• Something I learned or observed about the writing process: planning, drafting, revising, or editing is…
• Something I worked hard on and improved is… 
• Something we did in class that helped me grow as a writer was…
• Something I want to improve on next time is…
• A specific question I have for Mrs. Essenburg about my story is…

Reading their responses this afternoon was a worthwhile experience. I was pleasantly surprised by the thoughtfulness and passion with which some expressed their reason for telling their story. I want students to be able to identify what they’ve worked hard on, to be proud of their work, and I want to be able to comment on what they see as their biggest focus of effort. I want to know how I’m helping them, and how I can help more. I want them to be able to set goals for themselves. And I love to be able to answer the questions writers actually want to know the answers to, rather than commenting ad nauseam on things they don’t care about! Here are some of their responses: 

The reason I wanted to tell this story is…

• Don’t think only about you. Think about the other person more than you.
• I think that friendship is important, and we have to respect the friendship because I think that my friends  help me to fix my problem and also challenge me, which leads me to more interesting things.
• I want people to imagine and expand their creativity so they can be good writers as well.
• I wanted the people that have a dream to know that if you work hard, someone will know that you are working hard. So never give up.
• To do stuff in peace or stay calm to solve a problem.

Something I learned or observed about the writing process: planning, drafting, revising, or editing is… 

• Planning the story before actually writing it helped me to take more time to think about my story and to come up with more specific details.
• I found some new errors that I couldn’t change. I need more time to edit!
• The more you plan the better because you can imagine more of what you are writing.
• Planning helps make my brain warm up, and helps me to think of how the story should go.

Something I worked hard on and improved is…

• How to start the story.
• How to make the reader more interested by ending the story mysteriously.
• My spelling because I think when my spelling is wrong the reader will have a hard time reading it.
• To try and give a good visualization.
• Adding details.
• Dialogues and dialogue tags.
• To give enough information to make the readers understand.
• Choosing strong verbs and adjectives.

Something we did in class that helped me grow as a writer was…

• Reading different kinds of stories.
• I learned how to choose the words.
• Planning the characters first helped me to fully think about how I could describe the characters in the story.
• The mini-workshops helped me a lot, but the best mini-workshop was the lead and paragraphs because I didn’t know about it before.
• Dialogue worksheet. This helped me a lot because you can put dialogue into your story which enhances the picture you’re looking at.
• Learning how to make leads.
• The whiteboard activity helped me learn where you put commas.

Something we did in class that didn’t really help me grow as a writer was…

• Planning quotes before actually writing the story was a bit difficult because deciding what the characters are going to say could possibly change later. (However, someone above said this was the thing that helped them the most. That’s how it goes.)
• I think the plans were difficult because I don’t think it was the perfect way for me to plan. (Planning was named by many writers as helpful. This writer seems to understand that planning is important—it’s just that this way didn’t work for this individual.)
• Correctly punctuate the dialogue from “Stray” didn’t help me a lot because of the labelling of the numbers. (Yes, I realize I made that exercise unnecessarily complicated, and I’m thankful this writer reminded me.)
• It all helped me, but I think the least helpful was the lack of practice writing paragraphs. (Yup. We started that exercise and ran out of time to complete it. However, when I edited their revised drafts, I realized it was more important to revisit dialogue punctuation than finish the paragraph exercise. See next comment.)
• About paragraphs because knew about it. 3% of chance to forget to use it.

Something I want to improve on next time is…

• Checking my work over and over. I just noticed a mistake (quite a big one) after  Mrs. Essenburg gave us back the print of the final draft.
• I want to use many kinds of words to describe things.
• To explain what’s happening/explain the setting by giving background information and not actually straight up say what’s happening.
• I want to improve on the plans.
• The action part because I think it’s lacking detail.
• I want to improve on the lead.

A specific question I have for Mrs. Essenburg about my story is…

• Did the first paragraph make you want to read the rest of the story?
• What should I do to learn more vocabulary?
• How can you exactly know where to start a new paragraph?
• Are there other ways that are easy to plan in the beginning?
• Was the story entertaining? Should I make it longer or shorter? Should I get rid of something? Was the setting clear? Is the lead good? (I get the feeling that this writer really wants to know!)

Overall observations: Student writers found planning really important. Most of what we did in class was helpful, and writers grew in a wide variety of ways. When they identified exercises that were less helpful, there were no surprises. I was pleased that a number of comments showed writers thinking about their readers. And I have a number of specific questions I can get back to writers about. Above all, I re-learned that post-writing reflection is a worthwhile exercise.

How do you help writers reflect on their learning?

Professional Reading for Summer 2021

One of the things I love about summer is the chance to do some serious professional reading—the kind that it’s just hard to find time for during the press of the school year. The books that I hear about during the year and think, “I really need to read that.” It’s not summer for me, on the Japanese academic calendar, until July 19, but it’s also true that anything I need to get shipped internationally in a pandemic really needs to be ordered. So this afternoon I luxuriated in the opportunity to comb through my Kindle, my physical bookshelf, and my wishlist to gather the list of professional books I want to read this summer. (I also just ordered the last one, and it’s promised to arrive by July 4, so—phew!—good thing I got the ball rolling on that one!)

What do I want to learn about this summer? It's a long list: bilingual education, new strategies for teaching nonfiction reading, book clubs, social justice and community involvement, and how to fail forward and live with courageous faith. In the fall, I want to know more about who my students are, how I can teach them even better, and how I can be the living curriculum of a healthy, compassionate, just, faithful life. Here’s the list for summer 2021!

Bilingual and Multilingual Learners from the Inside Out: Elevating Expertise in Classrooms and Beyond by Alison Schofield and Francesca McGeary. I’ll be a third of the way through my second year at a bilingual school, and I’ve been looking for professional reading on just this topic. I’m really excited to learn more!

Reading Nonfiction: Notice and Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst. Reading Cris Tovani 15 years ago began the transformation of my literature teaching. From what I read on my English teacher social media groups, Notice and Note for both fiction and nonfiction are the new Tovani reading strategies. And I’m much more experienced teaching fiction than nonfiction, so I picked that one to start.

Talking Texts: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum by Lesley Roessing. Also big in online English teacher discussions: book clubs. I’m up for the experiment.

How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice by Jemar Tisby. A good friend is also reading this book this summer, and I look forward to discussing it with her. As any form of racism is abhorrent to Jesus, as long as there are beloved image bearers of God suffering from it, I want to be aware of their experiences and of how I can be part of restoration.

Teaching to Justice, Citizenship, and Civic Virtue: The Character of High School Through the Eyes of Faith by Julia K. Stronks and Gloria Goris Stronks. Saw this on a blog recently, and it correlates with my school’s new student objectives, and my belief that what kids learn in the classroom is about so much more than collecting credits and a diploma at the end. It goes along with the next book on the list, and I don’t know that I’ll get to both of them, but they’re both on my Kindle, so I have the option.

 

Difference Making at the Heart of Learning: Students, Schools, and Communities Alive with Possibility by Tom Vander Ark. 

The Mindful Christian: Cultivating a Life of Intentionality, Openness, and Faith by Irene Kraegel. In social-emotional learning (SEL) “mindfulness” is a prominent thread. While it can be implemented in ways that can leave Christians uncomfortable, it also seems to me that being mindful of who we are and Whose we are, of what we have been given that is sufficient grace in this present moment, are all deeply Christian practices. So when a friend recommended this, I got it. I enjoyed the first several chapters, and then life happened. Now I’m promising myself “this summer.”

Risk. Fail. Rise. A Teacher’s Guide to Learning from Mistakes by M. Colleen Cruz. Another one I started earlier this year—this one as part of an online book discussion, and I didn’t keep up with it. I’m really looking forward to getting back into it. I want my students to learn from failure—to say that with any possibility of acceptance, I have to be able to model it myself. 

What are you hoping to learn this summer? 

Strengthening the Reading-Writing Connection

Students share their character planning graphic organizers: protagonist, antagonist, secondary characters

Outside, she heard the trunk of the car slam shut, one of the doors open and close. The old engine cough and choke and finally start up. —Cynthia Rylant, “Stray”

Reading those words, I can feel the sheets from my childhood bed as I lay awake listening to the grownups going about their business. It’s one of the things good readers do—make a movie in their minds out of the words they see on a page. Visualizing or envisioning images is what it’s often called because the sense of sight is the one most frequently described, though all of the other senses can also be used, sometimes to powerful effect. 

Cynthia Rylant imagined that scene, heard the sounds in her mind, translated them into words. Writing teachers everywhere urge their students to “show not tell,” and this is an excellent example of that. I then read those words, which reconstituted in my mind into the very image Rylant had in her mind. Or at least pretty close.

Sometimes there's a glitch at one end or the other. Recently, I asked students to copy into their journal a sentence they liked from the independent book they were reading and then explain why they liked the sentence. I looked over the shoulder of a student who was reading Charlotte’s Web and saw, “Templeton stuck his head up through the straw.” For some reason, the image of a drinking straw sprang into my mind and I could not think of any options. I was trying to imagine a rat sticking his head through a drinking straw and it just wasn’t working. I was baffled. I asked the student what he liked about that sentence, and he replied that he could visualize the image. So I finally had to ask, “Is this a drinking straw?” “No,” he corrected me, “it’s the straw that makes you sneeze.” Suddenly the image in my mind flipped into one that made perfect sense. 

Though my students read a lot of fiction, if I’ve ever had them write it, it’s been as a fun little project, or just a different way to explore a “what if” question. I’ve taught reading fiction but not writing fiction. This year I’m making my first foray into really teaching in a complementary way how to do what we’re observing the professionals do. To examine the process from both sides: identifying setting and showing setting, visualizing images and describing images, analyzing characters and creating characters, evaluating themes and embedding themes.

I’ve known for a long time the importance of participating in poetry creation rather than just consumption. I’m not sure why it took me so long to get it with fiction. But 6th and 7th graders seem to be getting it at a whole new level. After reading a couple of short stories earlier, this week students used graphic organizers that incorporated drawing as well as writing to plan their setting, characters, theme, and plot. They have been so engaged, planning and sharing their plans. I’m looking forward to seeing their stories come together next week.

Receiving language and producing language, receiving text and producing text, reading and writing, hearing and speaking, seeing and doing, visualizing images and showing images. It's how humans do deep learning. It's fun to see students doing it.